- The Frank Lloyd Wright Point Park project also included a colossal pier anchoring triple-decked bridges across the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. The drawing is from 1947. Credit: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation / Carnegie Museum of Art

- Frank Lloyd Wright's parking garage for Kaufmann's Department Store, Downtown, was to have been built on the site of the present Macy's garage. Edgar Kaufmann abandoned the project becaue of structural, functional and building code problems. The drawing is from 1949. Credit: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation / Carnegie Museum of Art

- Frank Lloyd Wright did a second rendering of the Point View Residences project on Mt. Washington in 1951 at Edgar Kaufmann Jr.'s request, after it was determined the estimated cost exceeded the anticipated returns from rentals. The new design gave each of the units unobstructed views of the Golden Triangle. Credit: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation / Carnegie Museum of Art

Daily Photo Galleries

If you care about architecture, here's an occasion for satisfaction and expectation.

Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, announced a week ago that they are going to centralize and preserve in New York the vast archives of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright, who died in 1959, after a design career that spanned seven decades, is not just the guy most often accorded the title of greatest architect of the 20th century. He also was very important to Pittsburgh in several ways.

His most famous residence — and he was as much as anything else a designer of houses — is Fallingwater, the 1930s weekend retreat for Pittsburgh's Kaufmann family. He also designed the nearby Kentuck Knob, a house now open to the public that shows with several exquisite interior spaces his ideas of what a relatively modest-sized house of the 1950s could be.

But what's relatively little known here are the almost fantastical ideas that he conjured for our city in the late 1940s when, under the sponsorship of department-store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, he revealed grand plans for the city's Point. These included magnificent bridges and a giant-sized megastructure enclosed in a huge circular automobile ramp (think Guggenheim Museum) right where the bridges would meet. This is where Point State Park is now.

This megastructure would have been a civic center housing a sports arena, an opera house, several theaters and a planetarium in addition to stores, offices and parking. The whole idea was hugely impractical – it would have barely connected with the rest of the city – and it was almost certainly unaffordable.

And, though some of the leaders of Pittsburgh's “Renaissance I” traveled more than once to Wright's studios to see the ideas in progress, the finished plan was widely dissed and quickly dismissed. Scaled-back versions were developed by Wright, but they were not taken up by the city's planners either.

Two bridges he designed for his later schemes were especially beautiful. They were cable-stayed suspension bridges — very much cutting-edge engineering at the time — and would have been suspended across the Allegheny and the Mon from one big tower at the Point. Had they been built, they would be world-famous landmarks all by themselves, though they likely could never have handled the kind of traffic we have today.

The Kaufmann-Wright endeavors still played a role in our city's history: They continued to challenge the city fathers of the time to think on a grand scale – something that was definitely needed as our smoky, dirty and worn-out old city emerged from World War II.

Wright's archives have for years been stored by the private Taliesin Foundation — the official custodian of Wright's papers — at the two sites where Wright maintained his studios. These were in Spring Green, Wis., and at Taliesin West, his winter quarters in Scottsdale, Ariz. Neither location was designed for preservation — or access — the way a library or museum is. In fact, the easiest access to Wright's letters in recent years was at a photocopy archive placed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

There are something like 23,000 architectural drawings, 300,000 letters and pieces of office correspondence, 44,000 photographs, plus building models, manuscripts and other items in the collection. Columbia's Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, which houses what's probably the most important collection of architectural books, drawings and archives in the United States, will likely make all the Wright materials available to scholars by the end of 2013.

All those involved in the movement of the archives believe it will add a new dimension to Wright scholarship, as it will make access to all relevant documentation easier and in one place. It also will enable more detailed study by architects, students and historians of some of the major Wright projects that were never built.

Plans for Pittsburgh are an example. Wright actually designed — mostly in preliminary stages — nearly a dozen other buildings for Edgar Kaufmann. There were several unbuilt projects for the land around Fallingwater, including a chapel and a gatehouse. But, for in the city, he also drew up a proposed parking garage for Kaufmann's Department Store (it would have been where the Macy's parking garage is now) and another building that would have been strikingly beautiful: an apartment building at the edge of Mt. Washington overlooking the Point.

Most of these designs were perfectly practical and buildable. But for various reasons, none came to fruition. This was sometimes because economic conditions became unattractive for a new venture, or Kaufmann simply changed his priorities. And in the case of the Mt. Washingon apartments — which were at a fairly advanced state of design — the death of Kaufmann's wife, Lilianne, threw the project off track. Wright's Mt. Washington design, incidentally, helped inspire Pittsbugh architect Louis Astorino's Trimont apartments and condominiums that stand on Grandview Avenue today.

One interior-design project did get built. Wright designed a striking office for Edgar Kaufmann in the Kaufmann's Department Store. But that office was dismantled during a subsequent store remodeling and is now a permanent exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

John Conti is a former news reporter who has written extensively over the years about architecture, planning and historic-preservation issues.

TribLive commenting policy

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments  either by the same reader or different readers.

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

We do not edit comments. They are either approved or deleted. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation.

We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don't want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly.

We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent via e-mail. To avoid distracting other readers, we won't publish comments that suggest a correction. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.

Print Source

Welcome to PrintSource, a division of Trib Total Media.

We have established a veteran team that provides daily and weekly newspaper companies with a comprehensive set of services that include design, print, packaging and delivery of their products, all from one source and location.

Gone are the days when each facet of newspaper printing and delivery had to be outsourced to different companies and venues. Now, PrintSource provides a viable solution with just one phone call.

Digital Sales

We offer a wide variety of traditional and new digital advertising options customized to fit your needs!

Whether you're just starting out, or you've been a keystone in the community for years, our knowledgeable staff can provide you with a customized package including online banners/advertisements, Social Media Marketing (Facebook / Twitter), Website development, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing solutions and much more!

Contact your local sales rep today for details, personalized proposal and a meeting to discuss how we can meet your needs.